Welcome to the Rightsizing Streets Guide

Many of our streets haven’t changed in decades, even when they’ve proven dangerous, or the surrounding communities’ needs have changed. When the roads have been altered, they have often been made wider, straighter, and faster, rather than more livable.

Rightsizing’s approach is not new to PPS or the larger transportation community. The emergence of the Context Sensitive Solutions movement in 1998 accelerated transportation professionals’ reevaluation of the presumption that wider, straighter, and faster roads are universally better. This paradigm shift has been glacially slow, but as with the glaciers, this movement has reshaped the landscape of transportation. The fact that wider, straighter, and faster isn’t always better has been the topic of severalPPSarticles.

This approach has momentum. Context Sensitive Solutions opened the door in ‘98; a few years later, the Complete Streets movement swept through it. These approaches emphasize that streets are not solely for moving cars at high speeds, to the detriment of other possibilities and the physical health of community members.

But these approaches created a new problem. As more and more people began to realize that streets don’t always have to be designed exclusively for high speed travel by cars, the public clamor for streets designed for people intensified. This clamor, rooted in years of frustration, was vented at professionals with little or no experience or any sound engineering practice on how to design streets for all users. If anything, awareness amongst the public that their streets don’t have to be just for cars increased the communication gap between engineers, planners, and community members.

New knowledge is needed about how to design roadways differently, and also the ramifications of doing so. This information is important both to stakeholders and transportation professionals, which is why I wrote the Citizens Guide for Better Streets several years ago. Professionals need to be comforted with data demonstrating that new approaches work within their transportation metrics, and stakeholders need to see case studies describing how and where innovative street designs have been launched.

Credit: Andy Singer

Fortunately, there are an increasing number of communities undertaking projects that reverse the trend of wider, straighter, and faster streets. I collected a number of these case studies during presentations by transportation professionals around the U.S. Thanks to a grant from the Anne T & Robert M Bass Foundation, PPS went further and spoke with folks who have championed rightsizing. The first results of our research are presented in our Rightsizing Streets Guide on the PPS web site.

Why ‘Rightsizing?’

It has become fashionable to call projects that reallocate street space to accommodate bikes, pedestrians and transit, “Road Diets.” This term resonates with advocates who have been frustrated with bloated overdesigned roads for years; I share their frustration.

But after working inside the transportation establishment for 34 years, I believe that Road Diet is often a polarizing term. When citizens walk into the City Engineer’s office and ask for a road diet, the outcome they have in mind is already clear, before any conversation takes place, and before any analysis of the problem and data takes place. This can put professionals on the defensive and drive them deeper into the comfort of their automobile-centric training. It is like having the message delivered on a note wrapped around a rock that hits them in the head.

Credit: Andy Singer

Rightsizing, on the other hand, opens, rather than narrows, the conversation. It avoids putting the transportation professional on the defensive and shifts the conversation from debating the solution to working together to define and then solve the problem. The decades of experience vested in our professionals can then be applied to solving a different problem: creating a road that serves all users, not just cars.

Much of the time, this will mean shrinking the road (aka putting it on a diet). Almost all of the time, it will involve reallocating existing space between the modes. Sometimes, we might all come to agree that the ‘right’ size could actually be an expanded roadway. In some circumstances, more cars, trucks, transit, or pedestrians may demand more space. Hey—if we are going to demand that our engineers have an open mind, then so should we, right? After all, isn’t the ultimate goal to accommodate all users adequately and safely, rather than to just shrink roads indiscriminately? If the preferred solution is sensitive to all contexts and modes, and is not smaller, that should be okay.

In accordance with this philosophy, what you will find in our new Rightsizing guide is a depiction of all sorts of projects that recast roads in order to accommodate all users. Changes described in the case studies include not only vehicle lanes converted to bike lanes, sidewalks, and medians, but also the creation of public spaces, and roundabouts in place of traffic lights.

Explore the Site, Help It Grow

PPS hopes that this will be the beginning of a larger set of resources with information on more projects that can lead to Livability and Streets as Places. We want this to be a project created by and useful to everyone—professionals, community members and advocates alike. We don’t want this resource to be static as of January 2013; we invite any and all of you to submit additional rightsizing case studies so that we can continually expand our highlighted range of solutions for our streets.

Not one of the case studies has protected bike paths on both sides – the best is Prospect Park West which has a two-way path on one side. None of the others even have protected bike lanes, just crappy skinny bike lanes. Welcome to 1995.

David Nelson

@f7bf3f7d9caa8c99de5ee9027628857c:disqus In the coming weeks, we will be adding a database of the sources we used to create the Rightsizing Streets Guide. The database will include a wealth of information, not all of it could make it into the final product, including examples from more residential contexts.

David M Nelson

Jim, after analyzing hundreds of materials, we selected Rightsizing case studies that had (1) followed an exemplary process and (2) best documentated the outcomes of that process using before and after study. No single design element, such as protected bike lanes, was valued over any other. There are plenty of examples of Rightsizing projects that have installed protected bike lanes, we’d be happy to direct you towards those resources if you’d like.

Minimum street widths are mandated by fire codes. Current fire code requirements presume that streets must be wide enough for fire apparatus to pass each other going in opposite directions. The reasoning for the requirements is that multiple apparatus ( two pumpers and one ladder truck) are needed to handle a fire in a detached one-two family dwelling. The practice is for the ladder truck to position in front of the dwelling, an engine behind or in front of it and a second engine at the nearest hydrant.

This practice is not necessary in subdivisions with sprinklered homes. Given the low cost of plumbing-based sprinklers (50 cents per square foot) v. the increased revenue to builders from narrower streets, fewer hydrants, longer deadends, smaller setbacks, etc., we can create more livable communities and actually increase fire safety.